An inspiring leader

Ashish Dhawan, Vice President and Country Manager, Nortel India is an inspiring leader who is known for his never say die attitude. His strong negotiation and communication skills have lead to record sales for Nortel’s enterprise business. By Akhtar Pasha

Ashish Dhawan believes in a can do attitude—he deals with new business where his ability to deal with change and find opportunities in it comes in handy. He feels that he has been fortunate to have wonderful managers from the beginning of his career who have not only inspired him but have also helped shape his career and straightforward attitude.

His father worked for a PSU and he spend his entire childhood in Mumbai and is basically a Mumbaikar. Having done his schooling in Mumbai, he did a BE in Computer Engineering in 1991 and later studied Management from the University of Mumbai. For further studies, he joined the Advanced Program in Strategic Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 2008.

Career graph

Dhawan said, “During campus placements, at the fag end of my BE, I had the option to choose a career in either software development or sales. My wanderlust made me naturally inclined towards a sales career.” Hence the job that he landed was that of a Marketing Executive at Wipro Infotech Ltd in 1995. From there he moved on to Philips as Marketing Executive in 1998 and later came back to Wipro Infotech as Senior Marketing Executive in 1999. After a year he joined Nortel in September 2000. Looking back at his professional journey, he said, “Eight and half years have passed and here I am responsible for growing Nortel’s business by 50% YoY for the past eight years. My greatest achievement is creating teams in various regions from scratch and contributing towards their development to make them true leaders in Nortel.”

A people’s leader, he has an immaculate and enviable record in enterprise sales. With strong business acumen, he excels in the art of negotiation and delivering value in a typical ‘buyer-seller’ relationship. Deriving strength from his effective and strong communication skills, his approachable, friendly, trustworthy and never say die attitude makes him a great leader.

With more than a decade of experience in playing the role of a technology enabler by providing Indian companies with cutting edge technology solutions, he has displayed remarkable panache and extraordinary leadership skills in building and maintaining teams, customer-channel relationships and handling complex situations.

Dhawan’s foresight in anticipating shifts in the market and technology can be attributed to his computer engineering degree from Mumbai University. Armed with APSM, Strategic Management from IIM, Calcutta, he is a champion of the enterprise business model along with the go-to-market structure. His ‘focused sales approach for large enterprise accounts module’ resulted in 50% growth, year on year. Under his leadership Nortel has won large projects such as Reliance Infocomm’s largest contact centre deal in India, IP Telephony deals with large global banks like HSBC and DB, large government deals in Bihar and Chhattisgarh, Mumbai Airport, TCS, ITC, BSE and more.

In his current role he is the leader for Nortel’s enterprise business in India. As Country Manager he is in charge of all business activities within India and serves as the custodian of the company’s product line-up in the country and is responsible for all activities in relation to sales and business development and branding. He is largely responsible for all business activities pertaining to India, including, sales, distribution, marketing, after sales service, budgets and the like.

His dream—his career mission is to develop into an outstanding person in his work and to contribute towards making Nortel the best communications integrator in the world by tackling two vital issues namely improving employee productivity and reducing the overall cost of IT.

He enjoys camping with his boys, cooking is his stress buster. He also likes to read fiction and learn new languages.

Severe liquidity crisis in 2009

2009 is going to be a tough year he said as the credit crunch makes people spend less and save for a rainy day. This can lead to an overall decrease in global business revenues and the GDP of almost all countries. The smart people and companies will however look for hidden opportunities in this environment by making solutions that improve productivity and lower costs in general.

His suggestion for this weak economy is to be patience, resilient and ensure that the team keeps its chin up. Remember, only good people can ensure that good things happen in bad times, he added.

Message for aspiring leaders

“Honesty, competence and a talent to inspire (a set of values that can be learned) is the core of effective leadership,” said Dhawan. One must always keep these three virtues in mind as CEOs. This goes beyond the skills of strategic decision making that must come naturally to a good CEO.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com